Surprising oneself

I like to surprise myself. Sometimes life is a mystery novel, in which we wait with bated breath to see what it is that we will do. This only seems to apply in certain particular situations – mostly where the decision really doesn’t matter.

I live near the top of a hill and, approaching my house from the West or the South one has to climb that hill. There are several ways of doing that, but two main ones. As I climb the road next to the park on my bicycle I have the option of continuing up that road until I come to my street, and turning up that. Or I can turn earlier and climb up a side street instead. The climb along the side street is shorter but steeper. So when I’m coming home I have the choice of the shorter, steeper hill, or the longer, shallower – but also more dull – route.

As I climb towards the turn I wonder – which one shall I take? I could try to reason my way about it, making up lists of pros and cons in my head and weighing them up. But I don’t. Instead I wait to find out which I will do. The secret answer to the question is already there – perhaps buried deep inside my nervous system, or perhaps still awaiting some final external stimulus to tip the decision one way or the other – a breath of wind, a car passing by, a creak of the cranks. Who knows what it is that determines the final choice?

All I know is that, as I approach within about ten metres of the possible turn, I will start to know what has been decided. Sometimes I will know straightaway, and be able to revel in, or marvel at, the certainty of the decision for a second or so before the actual turn. Sometimes I trick myself though – I find myself thinking it has been decided that there will be no turn today, when all of a sudden, at the very last second, there I am turning the corner.

One might say that I like to keep myself guessing.

There is a strange feeling of irresponsibility about it, as if the decision were nothing to do with me. It happens sometimes too with little quips that I think of possibly contributing to a conversation. I see the sentence fully-formed in my mind, but do not know whether I will say it, because I do not know whether it will amuse my interlocutors. So I wait and see whether it gets said, by me. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. I never know which until I’ve already started talking, or the opportunity has passed. Why the difference? Nobody knows.

This may be all very interesting, but it would be less fun if it applied to decisions of significant moral importance. Fortunately, for me and, apparently, for most other people, it doesn’t. I think of Camus’ outsider, Meursault, looking at the man before him on the beach, at whom he is pointing a loaded, cocked pistol (for no good reason), and wondering whether he, Meursault, will pull the trigger. I have never been in a similar situation – one of the many advantages of not owning a gun – but I would hate to think that I could look on the question of which way I would decide on an issue of such significance, as something amusing, diverting, outside my control.

While one can make theoretical arguments that whether or not I will choose to do X is purely determined by pre-existing circumstances, there is nevertheless a powerful, nay dominant, feeling of being involved in the decision, of being in control of one’s actions, when the stakes are high. So it is for me at least. Perhaps that’s what was so disconcerting about Meursault – that he had no greater feeling of involvement in, or responsibility for, the decision to shoot the man than he would for a decision to take the shorter, steeper path up the hill, or to risk telling a lame joke.

I cannot like Meursault, but I do feel sorry for him. There but for the grace of God and all that. Perhaps that’s part of what Camus was trying to do. He dissolved the black and white certainties of good and evil that plagued the world at the time of his writing.